How to Get Over “Ambiguity Intolerant” Approaches to Social Theory?

A Feminist Critique of Adorno's Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory

Abstract

This article analyzes Theodor Adorno’s empirical research on the authoritarian personality and its underlying theory of reification, in order to interrogate how Adorno produces a theory of society which can overcome “ambiguity-intolerant” approaches to social theory. It is based on three hypotheses. The first concerns the relationship between method and social diagnosis elaborated in The Authoritarian Personality; here, I focus on Adorno’s search for a method to examine the reification of the individual in late capitalist society without externalizing this reification. Adorno’s specific way of overcoming a positivistic approach towards society brings me to my second hypothesis, wherein I try to understand positivistic approaches to society as “ambiguity-intolerant” ways to understand society. I consider these “ambiguity intolerant” because their two main criteria, namely “axiological neutrality” and “objectivity” do not allow a dialectical and therefore ambiguity-tolerant understanding of society. My third hypothesis is based on the idea that Adorno is not alone in his project of a critique of positivistic approaches: since the 1970s, at least, feminist epistemologies have also sought to critique the positivistic idea of an axiological neutral and objective knowledge of society. I then show how a feminist critique of Adorno can criticize his theory of the knowing subject as not sufficiently precise. Using Sandra Harding’s idea of “new subjects of knowledge,” I demonstrate that a feminist critique of the knowing subject can produce an empirically more vivid knowledge about the reification and corporality of the knowing subject in late capitalism.